Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

4: Lamarck: The First Evolutionary Theorist

Who would dare to put boundaries to the human intelligence, and to assure that there is a knowledge man will never acquire or a secret he will never penetrate?

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

The Natural Sciences

Members of the French nobility had names as long as a freight train – so too Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, usually referred to as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, or for short Lamarck (1744-1829). The fame of this extraordinary scientist has been eclipsed by the aura enveloping Charles Darwin. When Lamarck is mentioned, it is mostly in “a systematically denigrating way, often ill-founded, not only by numerous biologists but also by historians of biology.”¹ This is without exaggeration one of the great injustices in the history of science. Lamarck’s vitally important work, which would make Darwin possible, is suppressed or misrepresented because of a lack of knowledge; and the scientist himself is condemned to oblivion, even though his stature equalled Darwin’s.

Lamarck, after a brief career in the military was cut short because of an injury, entered science as a botanist. With the support of his mentor in the early period of his life, the great Buffon, he became the curator of the Parisian Botanical Garden. With his thirst for knowledge and his encyclopedic mind Lamarck published before long the basic reference work in French botany, La Flore française, consisting of three fat volumes. It made him at once the most famous botanist in the land.

In 1793 his career took another sudden turn: he was offered the chair of “insects and worms” at the newly founded National Museum of Natural History in Paris. This was an academic position of low esteem, supposedly presented to him because nobody else was interested. All the same, it provided Lamarck with a stable and well-remunerated job, and he dedicated himself to this new field of study with his considerable capacities and innate zest.

The invertebrate animals, to which the insects and worms belong, were of course included in Linnaeus’ general classification, but they had never retained the Swede’s attention. Their classification was still chaotic and the knowledge about them rudimentary, not to say often fanciful. Lamarck would change all that and become the real founder of the classification of the invertebrates (the animals without backbones), which, for the first time, he clearly separated from the vertebrate animals (the animals with backbones). He himself would describe no less than one thousand species of invertebrate fossils. The volumes of his classical Natural History of the Invertebrate animals, showing “a knowledge sans pareil,” was published from 1815 to 1822.

Lamarck would in fact be the first to sketch a scientifically warranted ‘tree of life’, some fifty years before Darwin. The separation of the invertebrate animals from the vertebrate ones showed the hierarchical structure in the evolutionary descent of the latter. Attention may once more be drawn to the direct influence of Linnaeus’ classification on the mind of a naturalist like Lamarck and thus on evolution, and to the silent presence of the hierarchical structure of the chain of being behind it all.

Founding Biology

“Lamarck is truly the inventor of biology as a science of life and of the living beings. Not only did he invent the word ‘biology’, he was also the first to understand biology as an autonomous science – a science not only distinct from physics and chemistry, but also from taxonomy [the classification of living beings], anatomy, physiology and medicine. The subject of this science was to study the characteristics common to plants and animals by which they are distinguished from inanimate bodies. This new science had to study the living beings as being alive and therefore different from inanimate objects.” Thus writes the French historian of science André Pichot.²

Lamarck used the word ‘biology’ for the first time in 1802. It is formed from the Greek word ‘bios’, meaning ‘life’, and the commonly used ‘-logy’, from ‘logos’, meaning ‘word’ or ‘knowledge’. In one of his writings he defined the term as follows: “Biology comprehends everything that has to do with living bodies, and particularly with their organization, their developments, with their increasing complexity and the movements of life, with their tendency to create specialized organs, to isolate them, to centralize their action around one point, etc.”³ At first sight this definition looks quite abstract, but each term has its concrete significance in Lamarck’s way of thinking, as we shall see.

On top of all that, Lamarck was one of the founders of paleontology, the study of living beings in times very long ago based on remains of their bodies. The questions about life in those times presented themselves to his discerning mind while looking for the petrified relics of ancient life, which he called ‘fossils’ – a word also coined by him. Some ideas about fossils, even at the end of the Enlightenment, were still rather odd. Biblical literalists continued thinking that God had not only created the animals, but the fossils too. Fantasies about the gigantic, apparently misshapen or strangely familiar bones were rife. Lamarck was one of the first to see their fundamental importance within the framework of an evolutionary schema.

He found, for example, an explanation for the fact that fossil shells of Nautilus pompilius were discovered not only in places in France, but also in “the ocean of Greater India and the Moluccas”, the Malay Archipelago; from this he deduced that at one time the landmass of which France was a part must have been under the sea. (Leonardo da Vinci had already drawn the conclusion that mountains must have been covered by the sea when fossil sea shells were brought to him from the Dolomites, but two centuries ago little was known about the scientific knowledge of the Florentine.) Lamarck also noted that the same fossils were found in the same sedimentary strata of France and Great Britain. He concluded correctly that both land masses had been connected in a far past, but that they had been separated afterwards by changes in the sea level. Systematizing this branch of his newly gathered knowledge, Lamarck founded what he called the science of ‘hydrogeology’.

Confronted with all these new data, the importance of time, much time, became vital. The sciences of the Earth and of life demanded an “immensity” of geological and paleontological time. “Oh, how enormous is the antiquity of the terrestrial globe!” wrote Lamarck. “And how small are the ideas of those who attribute to the existence of this globe a duration of six thousand years from its origin to the present! And how much this antiquity of the terrestrial globe will still be increased in the eyes of man when he will have obtained a correct idea of the origin of the living bodies, as well as of the gradual causes of the development and the perfection of the organization of these bodies, and especially when he will realize that the time and the circumstances have been necessary to bring all these living species into existence as we see them at present, and that he himself is the last result and at present the maximum of that perfection, of which the end, if there is one, cannot be perceived!”⁴

Linnaeus had accepted the time scale as calculated by Archbishop Ussher, according to whom the Earth was 6000 years old. Buffon had prudently suggested an age for the Earth of 70 million years. For Lamarck, James Hutton and Charles Lyell the perspective backwards and forwards in time became endless, or at least indefinable – for only in this way could the strata of the Earth’s crust and, in them, the fossils of paleontology be explained. A biographer of Charles Lyell recognizes that it was Lamarck who provided the instrument of stratigraphy and that he is therefore, with Cuvier, one of the founders of paleontology. “Lamarck’s great systematic study of invertebrate zoology [and of ‘hydrogeology’] had been the indispensable foundation for the study of invertebrate fossils and their use in the identification of strata,”⁵ the layers of the Earth’s crust formed during long time periods by sediments of fossils, plants and erosion of the soil.

The number of new sciences which Lamarck founded or systematized – and we have not even mentioned meteorology – may perplex the reader. This, however, was an axis time for what are now called the biological sciences. There had been Aristotle, Galen, Descartes and La Mettrie, Paracelsus, Vesalius in Padua and the naturalists connected in one way or another with the University of Leiden, that practically forgotten but important former centre of medical research;⁶ each of those names, and many more, are worth a chapter if not a volume in the history of biology. But what is now known under this name was systematized mainly by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It is noteworthy that this take-off of the biological sciences came more than a century after Isaac Newton had published his Principia Mathematica (1686). Physics, based on mathematics, was considered a true, ‘hard’ science; the ‘soft’ sciences of which biology was comprised tried desperately to catch up with physics and to base themselves also on the scientific method.

As Lamarck wrote: “For the man who dedicates himself to a career in the sciences, more particularly the physical sciences, and who wants to contribute to their progress, nothing is more advantageous than a strictness in the principles which allows him to deal only with exact knowledge, which makes him suspicious of any supposition or guesswork, and which makes him, above all, acquire the important habit never to confound what is truly proven with what is simply apparent. It is certain that for whomever wants to penetrate the secrets of nature, no quality is more desirable than the strictness I have just mentioned.”⁷

Checking the dates and the events in Lamarck’s life, it will be obvious that much of his scientific career was intertwined with the French Revolution and the Empire, the period in French history from 1789 to 1815. The Botanical Garden and the Muséum were creations of the Republic, and Lamarck’s mental outlook was that of the Enlightenment which led to the ideals of the Revolution. On the one side fanatical Jacobins killed the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, on the other the Revolution promoted the careers of naturalists like Cuvier and Lamarck. Generally speaking, it was a great time for new ideas in science, as is proven by the numerous discoveries and innovations. (Napoleon took a platoon of scientists with him on his military expedition to Egypt.) But the historical context had also its negative consequences for the acceptance of that science, especially in Great Britain, and for the differences in the scientific approach between the Anglo-Saxon countries and France up to this day.

God or Nature

The existence of God, from unquestioned, became ever more problematic and was already denied by many atheists. In his writings Lamarck still professed to be a deist – “a vague deist” – in the way Voltaire had been: recognizing the existence of God as creator, but removing him outside the works of his creation. God was “the Supreme Being” who had created nature with its laws, and who had in this way established an “order of things’ according to which the world developed or evolved in the course of time. “It has been supposed that each species was invariable and as old as nature,” wrote Lamarck, “and that it was especially created by the sublime Author of all things. But can we prescribe rules to him for the execution of his will and fix the manner he should follow in this? Can his omnipotence not have created an ‘order of things’ which successively brought into being everything we see, as well as everything that exists and that we do not know?”⁸ Nature, having been created by the Supreme Being, became a kind of substitute of God, possessing the powers to modify and develop. “I hope to prove that nature possesses the necessary means and the faculties to produce herself what we are admiring in her,” he wrote.⁹ Nonetheless, materialists like Lamarck posited that nature and everything in it was material and nothing else.

Lamarck is often erroneously labelled as a vitalist. He saw himself as “a materialist through and through,” although materialism then was not exactly what gross materialism is now. He wrote e.g. about the existence of the soul: “As to me, without repudiating any matter of religious belief or which can be a consolation to an honest person [un homme de bien] who has convinced himself of it, I say that this kind of consideration is absolutely foreign to my subject. For both the immortal soul of man and the perishable soul of the animals remain unknowable to me physically.”¹⁰ “Contrary to Buffon and many others, Lamarck declares that there is no living matter as such, nor is there a vital force. Matter is everywhere of the same nature, in the living beings as well as in the structures of the minerals. What is proper to life, is its organization. Living beings are organized beings.” (Claude Allègre¹¹) The quite pedestrian word ‘organization’ acquires here the unexplained, quasi magical power which others ascribe to ‘life’.

But “life is a mechanism,” a material mechanism, as is everything else. Lamarck, like Darwin, had gradually changed his outlook from that of a believer in ‘fixism’, a variant of creationism, to that of a materialistic evolutionist. The tradition initiated by Descartes was very strong, especially in France (Descartes, c’est la France!). According to René Descartes (1596-1650) the human being consisted of a body and a rational soul. His body, and that of all animals, was a mechanism, a machine; his soul was an “epiphenomenon” – one of those labelling terms which can mean everything without meaning anything. It will not take long before Julien de la Mettrie and his generation keep the mechanical body and discard the soul, on the same ground as the one of Lamarck quoted above, namely that “it remains unknowable physically.”

Knowledge is a search which starts from a fundamental ignorance. The gains of knowledge are hard-won and always limited; ignorance remains the pond on which float the lotus leaves of the acquisitions of human knowledge. Being an action of the mind, knowledge tries in vain to get a firm grasp on that-what-is, on Reality. It forms mental projections which try to circumscribe, to encompass Reality. One such projection is mechanical toys. The human being has always been fascinated by automata – from Vaucenson’s quacking duck in the 17th century to the futurist ‘humanoid’ robot – made to imitate the mystery of life. Mechanisms and automata were among the favourite playthings of the rich in the Renaissance (the engineer Leonardo was a master at designing and fabricating them), and afterwards at the courts of the European princes.

The comparison between living things and automata came naturally: “The picture of organisms that emerged from seventeenth-century science is filled with mechanical metaphors: the stomach as a retort, veins and arteries as hydraulic tubes, the heart as a pump, the viscera as sieves, lungs as bellows, muscles and bones as a system of cords, struts and pulleys … Thus each organic body of a living thing is a kind of divine machine, an automaton fabricated by nature, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata,” but which the materialist supposes to function in the same way.¹²

It is this mechanistic simile, created by an ignorance seeking knowledge, which has become one of the basic ways of reasoning of scientific materialism. What the mind, embedded in materiality, cannot know is held to be nothing but fancy which, at long last, should be swept aside. Reality, as mapped by the mind, may only be approached from the outside. The more numerous the accumulated data, the more accurate the reproduction, the map of reality. But as long as that what is real can only be approached from the outside, the reality of the real cannot be known.

The Progressive Upward Climb of Life

Nowadays the thought will come to hardly anybody that evolution does not happen from below upwards, from the simple to the more complex, from the one-celled protozoa to the mammals, but in the opposite direction, from the complex to the elementarily simple. Yet, the latter was the way in which evolution was at first supposed to have happened: as a degeneration. The donkey might be a degeneration of the horse, the monkey of the human. Buffon (1707-88), for example, mooted the opinion that originally “among the animals and even among the plants there might be not several species, but only one, which brought forth the other species by degeneration. If it were true that the donkey was a degenerated horse, there would be no limits to the powers of Nature, and one would not be wrong to suppose that, from one single being, she was in the course of time able to bring forth all the other organized beings.”¹³

When Lamarck put together his transformist theory in the years 1797-1800 the direction of the evolution was an as yet unsolved problem on which he had to take a decision. “If all the subdivisions which the animal kingdom comprises necessarily form a series of masses [i.e. populations or species] in the increasing or decreasing order of their composition, does one in the disposition of the series proceed from the more complex to the more simple, or from the more simple to the more complex?”¹⁴ However odd it may now seem to us, this was quite a reasonable question, given the facts that the story of a direct and perfect creation had been ingrained in the Western minds for centuries, that progressive change from an amoeba to an elephant is far from obvious, and that the biological sciences stood only just on the threshold of a scientifically founded knowledge and classification. It was a fundamental question.

The Chain of Being and Linnaeus’ classification had suggested the answer, and the ideas about evolution which were ‘in the air’ in the century preceding Lamarck pointed in the same direction: from the simple to the complex. But it was Lamarck’s enormous erudition that allowed him to definitively direct the arrow of the evolutionary trend in the direction accepted to this day. In his words: “It is therefore of extreme importance for the furthering of our future knowledge that we introduce in the general distribution of the animals a reversal, putting the most imperfect and simple animals at the beginning of the distribution [i.e. the branching off], while the more perfect, those with the most complex organization, will come at the end.”¹⁵ (Note the keyword “reversal.”) In one of his works at the time, Lamarck “again states clearly that he has discovered the fundamental connection which exists between classification and descent.” His system of the process of evolution as concretized in the history of the living beings gained instantaneous authority; it was e.g. copied as early as 1816 by a French naturalist as “Sketch of the descent of the animals from the infusorian to the monkey.”

Another fundamental problem was the origin of life. How had life appeared on planet Earth in an entirely material environment? Those “infusorians” – Lamarck’s word for the first life forms which he also called “monads,” or “matter barely animated” – where had they come from, how had they come about? Lamarck had no idea, just like Charles Darwin will have no idea and we still have not the foggiest.¹⁶ Therefore he accepted, like anybody else at the time and in previous times, the generatio spontanea, spontaneous generation. Life had appeared just like that, all by itself, automatically. (It is the inability of any scientific theory to answer a crucial question like this that makes many questioning people feel safe in a creationist worldview.)

However, this did not prevent Lamarck, as well as Darwin, to cover his ignorance with a screen of clever invention. The génération directe, as he called spontaneous generation, “consists simply of the arrangement, by nature, of a small gelatinous mass, and the creation within it of an interaction of fluids.”¹⁷ How did such a small gelatinous mass become a living being? Well, simply again, by the action of heat, electricity (a new fad at the time) and fluids (which may prefigure Darwin’s “warm pond”); these three elements suffice as the “stimulating cause.” – “Nature, among the bodies which have resulted from her operations, has been able to form some which could react to the first effects of an organization and the movements which constitute life. This is indeed what she seems to have done by producing, among the inorganic bodies, very small gelatinous bodies of the weakest possible consistency.”¹⁸ The composition of the cell was still unknown. But the knack of fabricating explanations to cover gaps in the knowledge will continue to be a frequent feature in the biological sciences.

Synthesizing his exceptional knowledge from diverse fields of research, Lamarck announced his theory of “transformism” in the year 1800. The word “evolution” was at the time associated with other life processes, especially the development of the embryo, and will not even be found in the first edition of Darwin’s Origin, where preference is given to the term “transmutationism.” Goulven Laurent notes: “It should be marked that the notion of the transformation of the species, introduced by Lamarck into the scientific domain, has not gone away since then, and that it has remained the keystone of the whole evolutionary edifice.”¹⁹

All great persons seem to have a nemesis. For Newton it was Leibniz, for Darwin it will be Richard Owen – and for Lamarck it was Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Cuvier was one of the great French naturalists and throughout his life much honoured in his country, for in his photographs his chest is bedecked with medals and orders. He was the founder of vertebrate paleontology, and became legendary for being able to reconstruct an animal unknown to him from a single of its bones. And he was a “fixist,” which means that he did not accept that life forms evolved over time; once originated, probably by creation, they remained the same forever.

Still, the fossils of the giant ground sloth, the Irish elk, the American mastodon, and many others, were proof that species had become extinct. Because he said so overtly, Cuvier was attacked by the Biblical literalists, “who could not believe that God, having created all things and pronounced them good, would allow any of them to be wiped out.”²⁰ His reasoning led to the formulation of “catastrophism”: gigantic catastrophes (the last one being the biblical Flood) explained the disappearance of so many species. From this standpoint he lashed out with his bemedalled authority against the gradualism of Lamarck on any possible occasion. Thanks to the prestige of Darwinism, gradualism won the day – for more than one and a half century, till the great biological extinctions had become incontrovertible, and Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge formulated their theory of “punctuated equilibrium” in the 1970s, causing a revival of the battle between fixism and gradualism.

Linnaeus had classified Homo sapiens among the primates, but it was Lamarck who showed, for the first time, that the human descended from the primate. Like all other living beings, the human was a product of nature, having acquired his particular complexity in a succession of generations through vast stretches of time and favourable circumstances. “Quadrupeds were transformed into bipeds.” The text in which Lamarck wrote this about the human descent was the first which described the evolution from monkey into human. This development, like all other transformations, had come about through the mechanism of evolution. “And so the human being was inserted into the category of the animals.”²¹

If everything is the product of nature, is nature, and therefore material, so must the human mind be too. “Let me ask what is that particular something that is called mind,” wrote Lamarck. “One says that it is special, related to the activities of the brain in a way which renders the functions of this organ of a different order than those of the other organs of an individual. I can only see, in that fictitious something without any counterpart in nature, a means of the imagination to solve the difficulties which one has been unable to eliminate for lack of having sufficiently studied the laws of nature.”²² What is here translated as ‘mind’ is esprit in the French language, which can mean ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ (and even ‘wit’). In Lamarck the first significance was out of the question. From a spark of the Divine the spirit or soul had been degraded to a rational, albeit still immortal being. Now that the mind had become the epiphenomenon of a machine, it was not even taken into consideration anymore. All life was matter and mechanism.

Transformism

Lamarck first made his evolutionary theory public in the year 1800. The seminal book in which he disclosed his system in full, Philosophie zoologique, was published in 1809, two hundred years ago at the time of writing the present essay. 2009 is the two hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the one hundred and fiftieth of the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Both events are being remembered by a spate of articles and special programs in the media, and of international meetings and commemorative conferences. In this commotion, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is routinely overlooked and could as well never have existed.

It matters to sketch his theory briefly, if only because it is so often ignorantly distorted even by well-known authors. The general basis of Lamarck’s thesis is that in the course of time “transformation” (i.e. evolution) of the species has taken place, from the elementary simple “monads” of life to the most complex species of animals, with the human at the top of them. On this basis Lamarck states that within the species there is a tendency to increase the complexity of their organization, resulting in numerous differentiations and specializations. In this way the species become more “perfect”, which is Lamarck’s word for ‘evolved’. According to him “it is the tendency of the living beings to increase their complexity which is the driving force of the evolution.” (Pichot²³)

The tendency of increasing complexity can not be realized unhindered. It is checked by the external circumstances, by the environment, which forces the species to develop certain functional shapes suited for survival in their environment. The circumstances create the besoin, the inner need to develop new organs for the organisms to be able to thrive in those circumstances; the need creates habits; the habits create organs. Lamarck puts it as follows: “The circumstances have an impact on the form and the organization of the animals … Great changes in the circumstances lead within the animals to great changes in their needs, and such changes in the needs lead necessarily to changes in their actions. Consequently, if the new needs become constant or quite durable, the animals adopt new habits, as durable as the needs from which they have originated.”²⁴

His second principle was: la fonction fait l’organe, sometimes rendered in English as: the use creates the organ, and consequently non-use makes an organ shrink and eventually even disappear. The word fonction, in this context, is ambivalent. If an organ does not yet exist, it cannot ‘function’; therefore it might be more accurate to understand that it is the habit, expression of a need, which creates the organ. The classical example of this evolutionary phenomenon is the neck of the giraffe. The need to find food higher-up in the trees than where other animals could attain, created the habit to reach for it and consequently the long neck. (Darwinists seldom omit to quote with condescending irony this example of Lamarckian naivety, unaware of the fact that Charles Darwin himself used the same example, which he may have borrowed from Lamarck.)

Lamarck called the modification of the organs, because of the changes in the needs and the habits necessitated by the environment, his first law. He formulated his second law thus: “All what nature has caused the individual [plant or organism] to gain or to loose because of the influence of the circumstances to which its species has been exposed for a long time, and consequently because of the influence of the predominant use of a certain organ, or because of an enduring defect of a certain part – all this she passes on by means of heredity to the new individuals which result from it, on condition that the acquired changes are common to both sexes or to those which have produces those new individuals.”²⁵ This is the famous Lamarckian law of “the inheritance of acquired characteristics.”

That characteristics which organisms had acquired during their lifetime were passed on to their offspring was generally accepted from Aristotle till after the publication of The Origin of Species. (It is still a widespread popular belief, as one can easily find out from expectant mothers and in discussions of family traits. Didn’t Darwin fear that his children would inherit his physical deficiencies?) The amazing fact is that Lamarck himself never came up with a theory explaining the inheritance of characteristics acquired in the Lamarckian way. He had no scientific explanation of the way heredity worked and he never proposed one. “This absence of a theory of heredity may surprise us, considering the ‘transformist’ ideas of Lamarck and the part played in them by the transmission of the character traits. It is the weak point in his thesis. No doubt, he accepted the notions of heredity which were common in his time.” (Pichot²⁶)

Yet, who did propose an explanation of heredity was Charles Darwin! He had not the faintest scientific proof of how heredity worked, but his mind was as fecund as that of any biologist in fabricating explanations where they were needed but lacking. Darwin’s explanation of heredity was his theory of “pangenesis” and the “gemmules.” The cells in all parts of the body of a living being secreted small particles containing duplicates of their essence. These particles were absorbed by the bloodstream, which carried them to the sex organs, where they concentrated in the eggs and in the sperm, and were thus transmitted to the offspring. Present-day Darwinians often cover this fanciful theory with the veil of discretion. But it is from the word ‘pangenesis’ that the word ‘gene’ has been deduced.

In brief, the evolutionary principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, for which Lamarck is almost exclusively famous, was at the time the current opinion, also among the naturalists, and it was turned into a theory not by Lamarck but by Charles Darwin.

Caricature

Then why, among the theoretical explanations of the fact of evolution, seems the field chiefly divided between two camps: a majority of Darwinians and a minority of Lamarckians? According to Lamarck the factors which cause the transformation of species are the external determinants of the environment. They create in response a besoin, an inner need, which ultimately creates modifications in the physical bodies. According to Darwin, on the other hand, the modifications in the species are caused by the internal factor of random variations, now called mutations, among which the favourable ones are selected in the confrontation of the organisms with the environment (the process of adaptation). Both views, as Pichot remarks, could be merged into one, but for the moment they are still stubbornly confrontational.

Although ‘Darwinism’ gained the upper hand, Lamarckism has always remained present in the background. It increases in importance every time the impact of the environment comes into play; it is now broadly accepted in the cultural field of evolution; and it is returning to full stature because of the recent discoveries in epigenetics. Then why does one continue reading statements like: “Lamarckism is false – in the biological world there is no inheritance of acquired characteristics” (Michael Ruse²⁷); or: “Lamarckian evolution was downright spiritual” (Robert Wright²⁸) when Lamarck was a declared mechanistic materialist; or: “Thanks to modern genetics, we know that Lamarck’s theory of acquired characteristics cannot happen” (Michael Shermer²⁹)?

The ‘Darwinian’ camp, as usual, refers its opinions to their source in holy scripture, Darwin’s texts. Darwin wrote disparagingly about Lamarck as he did about his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, although the pioneering thought of both of them had provided essential elements of his hypothesis. The recluse of Down may not have been an unfair man, but he could become extremely possessive where his life’s work, his theory of transmutationism with its irksome problems, was at stake. In this he did not differ from Newton or, in more recent years, Kelvin or Eddington, and many others.

Nevertheless, “the attitude of Darwin and the Darwinians towards Lamarck bestows honour neither on their intelligence nor on their intellectual honesty,” writes Pichot,³⁰ who pillories the systematic and often ill-founded denigration of which Lamarck is the object with many biologists and historians of biology. We will see that some quite level-headed authors allege that ‘Darwinism’ has become a fanatical sect, a scientific Church. Darwin, like Comte, Freud and Jung, did indeed show traits of the founder of a faith, while remaining subject to devouring doubts. The anti-Lamarckism and the false rumours it has turned into clichés seems to be the result, at heart, of a metaphysical faith in materialism, or a faith in metaphysical materialism, traceable to Darwin himself.

From this one should not conclude that (true) Lamarckism is no longer a factor in evolutionary thought and research. Burton Guttman writes in his book Evolution: “Lamarck’s ideas are worth mentioning if only because similar ideas, labeled ‘neo-Lamarckism’, keep reappearing in biology.” And Stephen Gould wrote: “Cultural change manifestly operates on the radically different substrate of Lamarckian inheritance, or the passage of acquired characteristics to subsequent generations. [Even a well-read biologist like the late Gould still identified Lamarck with ‘acquired characteristics’.] Evolutionists have long understood that Darwinism cannot operate effectively in systems of Lamarckian inheritance, for Lamarckian change has such a clear direction and permits evolution to proceed so rapidly that Darwin’s much slower process of material selection shrinks to insignificance before the Lamarckian juggernaut.”³¹ One could go on quoting in the same vain and show that even Francis Crick, on alternate days, dares to lean towards Lamarckism.

The following words of André Pichot are worth quoting in conclusion of this chapter: “Lamarck’s thought, though often neglected, is a monument in the history of biology, as much as the thought of Aristotle, unquestionably the only one with which he can be compared.”³²